Amazon highway is route to strife in Brazil

SANTARÉM, Brazil -- Along hundreds of miles of the north-south highway that bisects the Brazilian Amazon, the canopy of rain forests has been wiped out. Where the road is paved, loggers, ranchers, and commercial farmers have razed the landscape, removing valuable hardwoods and clearing fields for cattle and soybeans as far as the eye can see.

The half-finished 1,100-mile highway known as BR-163 is ground zero in a bitter conflict that has cost lives, jobs, and big money.

Last week, the Brazilian environmental agency granted a provisional license for paving the road. When it is completed, the highway will connect the farms and ranches of southern Brazil to overseas markets via Santarém, a northern, deep-water Amazon River port that feeds into the Atlantic. Journeys that now take weeks on a 600-mile stretch of muddy, potholed track that is virtually impassable during the half-year rainy season will be cut to days or hours. The highway would save hundreds of millions of dollars in the cost of trucking commodities south to the Atlantic, spurring growth for Latin America's biggest economy in its most significant export sector.

But those opportunities come at a price.

Supporters compare BR-163 to the Transcontinental Railroad that opened up the American West, saying it will bring jobs and development to one of Brazil's most undeveloped regions. But highways in the Amazon have also encouraged encroachment into the forest by loggers, land speculators, agribusinesses, charcoal producers, and mineral prospectors. Deadly land conflicts have followed, pitting newcomers against local peasants and indigenous tribes.

Some 17 percent of the Brazilian Amazon, the earth's most biologically diverse ecosystem, has been deforested over the last four decades. Three-quarters of the deforestation occurs within 30 miles of paved roads, according to government and independent studies.

And more than a third of the 1,400 killings over land disputes in Brazil in the last two decades occurred here in the frontier state of Pará, where the highway lies unfinished and the unexploited forest alongside it has provoked protests, lawsuits, corruption, and terror campaigns.

Critics have accused President Luiz Inácio ''Lula" da Silva of ignoring a burgeoning environmental disaster under pressure from agribusinessmen who produce one-third of Brazil's gross domestic product. But the killing earlier this year of a 73-year-old American nun in Pará provoked a dramatic shift in government policy that could have long-lasting effects in this part of the Amazon.

Sister Dorothy Stang, an Ohio native who was organizing peasants to resist illegal land seizures by cattle barons, was shot dead Feb. 12 in an alleged contract killing by ranchers. The government responded by sending troops and slapping a seven-month moratorium on all tree cutting in a 32,000-square-mile corridor surrounding BR-163 in southwestern Pará, where Greenpeace estimates that 90 percent of the lumber produced is cut illegally.

Two ranch hands were found guilty this month of murdering Stang and were sentenced to 27 years and 17 years in prison, respectively. Three ranchers have been charged with ordering Stang's killing, but are appealing the charges.

In June, the government arrested scores of forestry officials and middlemen who were allegedly forging logging permits that allowed companies to illegally clear-cut 76,000 truckloads of hardwoods from land surrounding the highway. Logging licenses, once distributed liberally, are now under review.

Loggers, sawmill operators, and commercial farmers blocked roads in protest, saying the logging freeze was paralyzing the economy and forcing them to lay off thousands of workers. The government refused to budge.

The half-billion-dollar project to finish the road was scheduled to start next year, but before work can begin, the Department of Transportation must prove it will not endanger plant and animal species or indigenous communities. Contractors have put funding for the project on hold amid uncertainties about whether the land around the highway will be put to profitable use.

In September, the federal government unveiled a plan to investigate and resolve disputed land claims around the highway and to designate 28,000 square miles surrounding the road in Pará ''conservation areas." These range from protected parks to areas for logging and mining under federal control. The decision infuriated ranchers, farmers, loggers, and miners who had already settled parts of the earmarked land, as well as state officials who fear investors will now flee. The two groups are pressuring Lula to scrap plans for national parks.

Brazil is the world's top beef, coffee, and orange juice exporter and is racing to surpass US farmers in overseas soy markets. But the clear-cutting and tree-burning to make way for huge farms threaten the planet's ability to resist global warming and has turned the Amazon into a massive carbon-emitting polluter. Brazil is now the world's fifth-worst producer of greenhouse gases.

Satellite surveillance data released in May indicated that August 2003 to August 2004 10,000 square miles of rain forest destroyed -- an area the size of Massachusetts. Seventy percent of carbon emissions in the country are caused by deforestation and tree burning, not by industry, according to the Brazilian environmental institute IMAZON.

Yet many poor residents of Pará say they can't worry about climate change; they need a modern highway to survive.

On a paved section of road 70 miles south of Santarém, farmer Antonio de Assis Alves, 54, dreams of the day the entire road is asphalt. ''We used to have to leave here by bus at 2 a.m. to reach Santarém by 5 p.m. in the rainy season," he said. ''Now in two hours we can travel to the city to sell our produce. It would be great if they would pave it all the way south to open more opportunities for us poor people."

A few miles south, where the road has not been paved, Manuel Matias da Silva, 70, is bitter about the decades he has waited for BR-163 to be finished.

''I've been here since 1974, when the government promised they'd pave the road," he said. A few years ago, he had to shut his gas station because traffic was too sparse. More recently, he closed his roadside cafe because the moratorium on logging meant no more trucker clientele.

''We can't stand it anymore -- we're living here with no electricity, no business, it's a wasteland," he said.

The further they live from BR-163, the less convinced locals are that the highway will improve their lives.

Peasants who harvest fruit and nuts from the forest complain that clearing by ranchers and soy-growers has depleted their food supply. Subsistence farmers say the pesticides used by commercial farmers are killing their chickens and pigs and poisoning river fish.

But those who have stood up to the business interests have faced threats or worse.

In Gleba Pachoval, a ghost village a three-hour drive down dirt roads southeast of Santarém, land speculators offered peasants cash to make way for big farms. Two dozen families who refused were visited by pistol-wielding thugs who set fire to their homes and made them and their children watch as they burned, former residents say. A female union leader who testified against the assailants says she now lives under death threat.

Authorities say it's a near-impossible task to prevent all illegal activity and resolve every land dispute in a sparsely patrolled forest nearly half the size of the continental United States. Of 5,000 to 6,000 people sanctioned annually for illegally cutting forest, fewer than 3 percent pay their fines and no further action is taken, said Paulo Barreto, a senior researcher for IMAZON.

Yet that too may be changing. On August 31, prosecutor Renato de Rezende Gomes won the first-temporary imprisonment of a rancher who confessed to clear-cutting 22,000 acres of federal land in Pará. Forestry officials and the Army have stepped up operations against illegal occupation and tree-clearing.

''We're on the front line here, trying to hold back destruction of the Amazon as soy growing moves up the highway," Gomes said. ''Land speculators are taking land from locals to sell to soy growers. The population is naive, and they get kicked off their land."

Leaders of three communities of Qilombo people, descendants of former slaves, say they are under death threats from land speculators after launching a campaign to acquire formal titles to lands they have farmed for more than a century.

''I have no way to protect myself. But for me the worst death would be for things to continue as they are," said Dileudo Guimaraens dos Santos, 40, leader of Bom Jardín, a village an hour's drive southeast of BR-163 from Santarém. ''Look at what happened with Sister Dorothy. . . . As soon as someone here is killed, I'm sure we'll get our land title," he said bitterly.

Stang's allies hope she will prove to be a martyr for the Amazon in the same way that the murder of activist Chico Mendes in 1988 led to the creation of protected areas in the western Amazon that permit rubber-tapping, nut and fruit harvesting, and limited logging.

''There's no doubt that out of her blood a new seed of resistance is sprouting. The creation of reserve areas in itself is an incredible achievement," said Geraldo Irineu Pastana de Oliveira, mayor of Belterra, a town an hour's drive south of Santarém.

Belterra's commercial farmers vehemently disagree. Pio Stefanelo, 38, manages 2,100 acres of grains and employs 32 people in his seed-processing plant. By settling the Amazon, he says, farmers are putting to good use land that would otherwise support no one.